Are the Oscars Becoming Irrelevant?

Well no, since you asked. But that doesn't mean they aren't deeply flawed.

The Oscars are the high watermark of film recognition. The red carpet trampling, lovvie love-a-thon that is the motion picture awards season starts in earnest with the Golden Globes in early January and extravagantly culminates every year in late February with the Academy Awards in which apparently "everyone is just thrilled to be nominated!" but in actuality hopes are realised, dreams are shattered and the presenters are almost constantly underwhelming. When it comes to the big night though it can all seem like a bit of game. A cynical, industry-driven game in which awards are doled out by the sensibility load and Martin Scorsese can win an Oscar through sheer bloody minded persistence (and a superlative body of work of course).

The awards themselves essentially boil down to the artistic whims of a group of voters who are predominantly older, whiter and male-er than your typical movie audience, and your typical movie audience they most definitely aren't. The 6000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a venerable bunch of industry professionals who once inducted are placed into their various pigeonholes of expertise. Actors, directors, cinematographers and writers all have their place to name a but a few with the experts in each category having more sway when it comes to the tricky business of voting. In the first round directors nominate the work of directors, writers of writers and so on with each member providing a list of their top five choices. These feed the candidates for the second round of voting to the Academy as a whole who then all submit their top fives in most categories. The exception is of course the be-all and end-all award of Best Picture which everyone votes for.

Oscar voters are people sustained and venerated by their own artistic endeavours and as such they won't be voting for any hack-produced hokum any time soon. Added to this we don't get many surprises either. We get them plumping for the worthy over the cinematic (think the choice of The Help over Tinker Tailor), the traditional over the innovative (War Horse over Drive), the heroic underdog over the perverted sex-addict (Brad Pitt's average display in Moneyball over Michael Fassbender's powerhouse performance in Shame).

Way back when in 1989 we got the starkest manifestation of this we could ever wish for with the triumph of the comfortably middle class over the radical and intelligent with Driving Miss Daisy winning best picture over Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing - a film that set the tone of black-centric cinema for a decade to come and wasn't even nominated. A case like that more clearly than anything shows how the mass appeal of the facile and one-dimensional can almost always triumph over the confrontational and original. This may seem like I am throwing The Help and Driving Miss Daisy together into some sort of race rights for dummies cadre and it kind of seems like I am. But Driving Miss Daisy cleaned up at the Oscars so of course it's brilliant. Of course it is! Anyone who says otherwise is stupid, or a Hollywood Foreign Press member. So both.

Speaking of which when you compare the Oscars to the Golden Globes our gold plated, statuesque friend comes out smelling of roses. The Golden Globes are the sort of unashamed silly affair that keeps re-hiring a presenter to hilariously lampoon their inadequacies in some sort of devil's pact for viewers. It's like someone building a house on a cliff using stone from the cliff face. At some point the Golden Globes, I mean house, ahem, will collapse and all of the viewers will leave and Ricky Gervais will have to find somewhere else to live out the creative death of his career.

What the Golden Globes do have over their more respected counterparts however is timing. If something wins at the Globes it's often a good indicator for things to come. By the time the Oscars swing round films like The Artist will have won so many awards that they'll we struggling for something to say other than "OMG OMG OMG OMG the Oscars are the best it's been my dream blah blah blah" that we've heard all before. There's none of the surprise that there should be for indie flicks like The Artist when they win a huge award as their expectations are already so high come February that a Best Picture victory will seem more like a relief than anything.

So why will I be staying up into the wee hours of the morning waiting to get my Oscar fix for yet another year? Well it's because they are just so bloody important and despite everything that I've said up until this point they still hold the requisite amount of artistic integrity.

More often than not the Oscars get it vaguely right and if they don't it's not usually that bad (apart from the Academy's complete disregard for Senna this year which is ridiculous beyond parody). Yes, last year The Social Network should have walked off with Best Picture never to be refuted but that on the night it went to The King's Speech wasn't terrible. The Social Network would've been (and had been) a success irrespective of awards attention but The King's Speech, high on the Oscar buzz it was getting - and Colin Firth's repeated walk-ons at every awards show imaginable - carried the film through its January and February release period to a humongous (and thoroughly deserved) box-office. That an artfully-inclined arthouse flick about a king with a speech impediment made $400 million worldwide is testament to the power of Oscar buzz. Without the Oscars such deserving films would get much less mainstream attention and I think cinema would be poorer for it.

Recently this also proved true for Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, 127 Hours, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Brokeback Mountain and the masterful Sideways to name but a few. Oscar buzz is the real force behind the Oscars. What happens on the night happens and will be raked over in movie posters for eons to come but the real relevance of the Academy Awards is in the bridge they build between the artistic medium of film and the mainstream engine of the film industry.

If you love films and hate to see the wrong things getting top recognition come awards night then yes it may seem like the Oscars are losing their relevance, but as an industry force they are nevertheless a force for good. Even if we do have to put up with the occasional give me a bloody Oscar already! film like I Am Sam (featuring the now famous Sean Penn going 'full retard' performance) or Seven Pounds (in which Will Smith begs for an Oscar so hard that I'm surprised he didn't actually grab his nearest box jellyfish and jump into a bathtub for attention come nominations), ultimately they bring (albeit a small selection of) lesser known gems to the masses.

So come 26 February 2012 I'll be sitting down to watch four hours worth of film industry back patting, self indulgent montage and lots and lots of hysterical speeches. But I don't think I'd have it any other way. Oh and Billy Crystal's back. Which is nice.